PART 1 — THE DOORS
Judge Perpetua Vane looked down at the petition.
“Mrs. Reyne. Your petition states that you are seeking an immediate dissolution and surrendering any claim to the marital home, the savings, both vehicles and your husband’s shareholding. Is that correct?”
I had one hand under my belly because at thirty-six weeks you do that without noticing.
“Yes, Your Honour. I don’t want any of it.”
There was a noise across that room.
Garrick was in a charcoal suit with no ring on. And Adrienne Kask was sitting next to him, on the applicant’s side, which is a decision somebody made on purpose.
She laughed.
Not nervously and not by accident. A short, clear laugh, and she got her hand up over her mouth about a second after everybody had heard it.
Judge Vane stopped everything.
“Ms. Kask. Interrupt this court again and you will be removed from it.”
I turned and looked at my husband.
“I don’t want the house he took her to while I was at scans. I don’t want the money he spent on her. I don’t want the cars or the furniture or anything with a lie attached to it.”
My voice went, and I stayed standing.
“I want my baby born a long way from him.”
Garrick stood up. “She’s being emotional, Your Honour. She’s trying to make me look like a monster.”
“Sit down, Mr. Reyne.”
He sat. His face did not.
And I said, “You’ve already taken the only thing that mattered,” which I had not planned and which I am not proud of, because it was for the room.
Then Judge Vane closed the folder in front of her and stood up.
“Before I make any order, there’s a matter this court needs to deal with.”
She said that before the hearing began she had gone out to the machines in the corridor and found a child crying on her own by the water cooler.
A child who had told her something about her father and about a lady.
Garrick’s face emptied. Adrienne stopped moving entirely.
The judge looked at the bailiff and said, “I’d like that child brought in, please, with the family liaison.”
Garrick took hold of the edge of the table and his knuckles went white.
The doors at the back opened.
And a six-year-old came in in a yellow cardigan holding a rabbit that has had one ear sewn back on twice.
I made a noise I have never made in public before.
It was June.
PART 2 — THE CANDLES
June is Garrick’s daughter from his first marriage. She is six. She lives with her mother and she has been at our house every other weekend since she was two.
I have been her stepmother for four years. She calls me Tam.
She was at the last two scans. She has an ultrasound picture stuck to her wall at her mother’s with sellotape that has gone yellow.
In the November we did her sixth at our house. About twenty-five people.
I made the cake myself, badly, because she had asked for a rabbit and I am not a person who can make a rabbit, and it came out looking like a grey dog.
I was carrying it in with the candles lit.
And Adrienne took it out of my hands.
See more on the next page
